I've run into a problem that I'm sure has been a popular one for many. I recently edited a photo of mine in Photoshop CS5 and when I save it to JPEG format and open it, the color is completely different. I've searched the web and have tried some of the solutions that have seemed to have helped others but for me it hasn't worked such as using sRGB and changing the working spaces to adobe RGB (1998). Both of which hasn't worked.

No answer but a few questions. What color space was the image edited in? When you saved it as a Jpeg file did you save it with an embedded color profile? When you opened the jpeg images did you open it with a color manages program like Photoshop or a non color image viewer or non color managed web browser?

Do you have a calibrated monitor? That's almost always not the case when newbies fool around with image processing apps. You need to be viewing your jpg in a color managed app also, such as a color managed browser or Preview on a Mac, Irfanview on a PC.

If you embedded the profile with the jpg and Photoshop is set to Preserve Embedded Profiles the jps should look pretty much identical to the psd in Photoshop at View > Actual Pixels (save for the jpg-damage).

That’s not my point at all – Mac OS has issues and I don’t consider it superior to Windows.

I know...just humoring myself. I am going to trouble shoot the program and research it a little further to see if I can get down to what is causing this issue. Thanks a lot thought, you all have been quite helpful and enlightening.

I took the image (the "second" one that I took a screenshot of in post 10 on the bottom) and uploaded it to ImageShack. When I opened it in ImageShack, I see that it looks just the way it did in Photoshop.

However, when I go back to my desktop and use the Micorosoft Picture Viewer program, it comes out slightly distorted. So I can atleast deduce the fact that the issue lies within the viewer.

Photoshop is a color-managed viewer — its reads a source profile (or applies its working profile) and Converts it to the monitor profile for a theoretical true-color display.

Your Microsoft Picture Viewer program — if it is not matching Photoshop — is more than likely not a color-managed viewer (or the document does not contain an embedded ICC profile) — Microsoft Picture Viewer is more than likely merely sending the source RGB straight through to the monitor unchanged.

This would be very easy to prove in Photoshop by opening the image in Photoshop so it appears correctly, then: View> Proof Setup: Monitor RGB

First, open the image in the program that you call "Microsoft Picture Viewer program" and read carefully the name of the program. The name of the Microsoft programs is usually on the top left corner of the title bar and may be proceeded with the name of the currently open file. If you can't find it look Help > About menu of that program.

On Windows 7 the default image viewer is called "Windows Photo Viewer" and is fully color managed - it will display images with any profile with identical colors as Photoshop.

If the program that you are using to view the image is not color managed it cannot display identical colors with the color managed programs like Photoshop unless the image is in the color space of your monitor (not affected by color management)

Second, any changes in the color settings in Photoshop will not have any effect on the currently open images with color profiles. So, before starting anything to do with color management of an image the first step is to check what is the current color space of the document. In post #10 c.pfaffenbichler told you how to check that.

Color management isn't difficult, it just has to be there. But in many applications it isn't, and then everything breaks down unless you take your precautions. Not using ProPhoto is one of them. Stick to sRGB.

First question to ask in color management troubleshooting: Is the application color managed at all? You'd be surprised how many aren't.

This is a few years old but I had the same problem and I found this solved it: go to 'Edit > Convert to Profile' and choose 'sRGB IEC61966-2.1' or perhaps whatever you have that starts with sRGB? After doing that when I save as JPG and open using the default Windows 10 photo viewer the color looked a lot better than before. There have been a number of responses here but what has not really been addressed is I want to make sure the image will look the same to other people on other computers in whatever web browser or photo viewer they are using, which we have no control over. And if I cannot get it to look the same (with the exception of perhaps monitor settings and/or ambient lighting conditions) on two separate applications on my own computer with the same monitor and ambient lighting how can I expect my clients will see what I am seeing?

What I meant by not addressed is that for example your previous reply states that many applications do not have color management which is indeed a problem which we have no control over when other people are viewing our images. You did mention to stick with sRGB but I did not make the connection on what that meant in terms of what to do in Photoshop with my image, thus my response.

Something else to note which I only now found based on this discussion and might be useful to people is if you are using Lightroom under 'Edit -> Preferences -> External Editing' I had to change the Color Space under the edit in Adobe Photoshop section from ProPhoto to sRGB to make it the default.

If all displays had identical characteristics and identical response, we wouldn't need color management. But they don't and we do.

But for most practical (non-critical) purposes, most displays are natively fairly close to sRGB. This means that a file prepared in sRGB will display roughly right, without any color management. That's the best you can ever hope for.

Note that this isn't just a matter of neutral color balance. Primaries are all over the map, resulting in very different hues, and tone response curves are bumpy and irregular. All this is recorded in your monitor profile.

Hello Everyone, I am also quite new to Photoshop, (6 months) and I also ran into this problem, a problem that I usually "solve" by just printing my screen and reassembling the image in GIMP, which is a very laughable technique but gives me the results I want. (and yes its also incredibly hard and time taking for large pictures)

So I was wondering if anyone has come up with a solution? I really doubt it has anything to do with color management but rather, perhaps, Photoshop just being unable to deal with format conversion? I'm not sure.

For this particular problem I asked help to my teacher (I took a 4 month Adobe course) and not only he never noticed before, but he also couldn't solve it, not even on mac. I have been using GIMP for at least 10 years and it never had such an issue, so why does this only happens with photoshop?

In fact as I was typing this post, I tried saving a psd file and then open it on GIMP and the result was the same... is this more like a photoshop UI problem?

And yes, I have tried everything, setting color management to monitor; when saving, checking the sRGB thing; Getting rid of color management altogether; and nothing seems to work other than just taking screens of photoshop...

You have a defective/corrupt/broken monitor profile, which breaks the color management chain in Photoshop. Fix that and Photoshop will display correctly.

Applications without color management don't use the monitor profile and are not affected.

Actually, I Finally found an explanation to the problem and how to fix it.

The simplest solution to this problem seems to be to just Turn on View>Proof Setup> Monitor RGB and then also View> Proof Colors just BEFOREyou start working so you work in whatever colors Photoshop will color change when you save, so when it saves you won't perceive a change. Unluckily this means that if you already touched the image or colors, you have to redo all your work or copy it to windows clipboard in order to preserve your colors outside of PS.

I don't know how PS works internally (I mean in detail), but it seems that everything has something to do with Proof Settings More than anything else. Photoshop seems to always start with a proof of Adobe RGB or similar, instead of your monitor, this tampers with the color values and can be easily proven by having several colors when PS starts, then taking a screen, then switching to Proof colors (preferably monitor rgb) then pasting, and you'll notice you'll have both sets of colors, the ones you thought to be working with and the ones PS will actually save your image with.

If you look closely at the pink and orange, the top view is how photoshop displays everything at startup, which is Adobe RGB I think, and then bellow is how everything looks when I save. (This whole image is inside the photoshop canvas.)

But then this makes me think that what others see will be the thing that PS shows you, but I don't know really. It could be the one from monitor. In the meantime I found The workaround.

I think it would be most advisable to first check that your monitor is correctly set with RGB proper and then compare the photoshop proof with monitor proof so that you don't get this problem anymore. There are a series of really complex perception illusions at play here.

I will go ahead an try to calibrate my monitor to what photoshop uses at startup and see what happens...

The simplest solution to this problem seems to be to just Turn on View>Proof Setup> Monitor RGB

That's not a solution, that just bypasses the bad profile by temporarily disabling the display color management chain.

The profile is still bad, and that's the cause of your problem.

As a temporary workaround until you get a calibrator to make a new profile, set sRGB as default display profile in Windows. Photoshop uses whatever display profile the OS tells it to use. Relaunch Photoshop when done so that it can load the new profile at startup: